When Jim Kaat retired in 1983, he did so in his 25th season in the major leagues. At the time, that was the Major League Baseball record for most seasons played.

Greg Sullivan

When Jim Kaat retired in 1983, he did so in his 25th season in the major leagues. At the time, that was the Major League Baseball record for most seasons played.

During a career that spanned four decades – he debuted with the Washington Senators in 1959 and finished with Philadephia – the left-hander won 283 games and lost 237. He had many a thrill during that quarter century, including 16 Gold Gloves, a pennant with the Minnesota Twins in 1965 and, in 1966, a 25-13 record that would have netted him a Cy Young Award if, as it started doing one year later, Major League Baseball had handed out American and National League versions of the award.

The 6-foot-5 left-hander also had a few disappointments. One sticks out.

One game ahead of the Red Sox in 1967 when they came to Boston for a regular-season-ending two-game weekend series, the Twins lost twice and finished a game behind the Red Sox for the American League pennant.

“As I look back at it, it was the most disappointing experience in my career,” Kaat said. “I say that in the context of having played as long as I did.”

It was the Impossible Dream for the Red Sox. For the Twins, it remains a nightmare, especially so for Kaat whom, if you ask at least one member of the ‘67 Sox, was on his way to popping the Impossible Dream bubble that Saturday.

A disappointing 9-13 through August that year. Kaat in September produced what he said was the best pitching of his career: Going 7-0 in seven starts, averaging nine innings per outing, heading into his start at Fenway Park on Sept. 30.

He remembers talking to Koufax, then a TV analyst, in the trainer’s room before that game. “I was as confident at the time as any pitcher could be,” he said.

Kaat lasted only 2-1/3 innings. But it wasn’t the Sox who knocked him out of the game.

Pitching with a 1-0 lead, Kaat in the third inning injured a ligament in his throwing elbow, an injury which these days is corrected with Tommy John surgery. To that point, he had surrendered three harmless hits, walked one, and struck out four.

Many years later, after their baseball playing days, Kaat and Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski both lived in Boca Raton, Fla. Kaat was out for a bike ride one day and came by Yaz who told him if the lefty hadn’t gotten hurt that day, the Sox weren’t going to win the game.

“We wouldn’t have beaten him,” echoed Swansea’s Russ Gibson, the Sox’s starting catcher that day and one of Kaat’s four strikeout victims. “You couldn’t believe the stuff he had. He was pin-point. He was on the black. His breaking ball was working.”

“I had never had any arm problems,” Kaat said. “But in 1966, I pitched 305 innings. That September (1967), I had pitched 63 innings. My arm just reached a point where it was too much in a short period of time.”

Kaat was pitching to Boston pitcher Jose Santiago when the elbow failed.

“I threw a pitch, and it was like I was hit in the funny bone,” he said. “The elbow was vibrating. I shook it off. The next pitch, it went up there like a slowpitch softball.”

He had to leave the game, and the Sox went to work against Jim Perry, Ron Kline, and Jim Merritt, who surrendered a three-run home to Carl Yastrzemski in the seventh inning.

Disappointed at seeing what would have been his team’s second pennant in three years slip away, Kaat said the Twins then and now credit Boston, for what the Sox did in those last two games and the entire 1967 season.

He had been a first-hand witness in 1965 when Minnesota won 17 of 18 games against Boston.

“We respected how the Red Sox bounced back,” he said. “In ‘65 and ‘66, it was just pathetic the way the Red Sox played. Dick Williams came in and restored some law and order. They had a miraculous year.

“All in all, it’s fun. I still look back on that season. It was as great a pennant race as we’ve had in our lifetime.”